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Northern lights dance with a comet

Swedish photographer Goran Strand created a 10-image mosaic of the sun using a hydrogen-alpha filter on March 16, and then captured full-sky views of the northern lights over Ostersund during a four-hour period on March 17 for this time-lapse video. "The time lapse consists of 2,464 raw images for a total data amount of 30GB. ... All in all, this movie contains over 40GB of data that I've been processing over the last five days. Hope you enjoy it," Strand writes. Watch the video in full-screen HD for maximum effect. Music: "I Am a Man Who Will Fight for Your Honor," by Chris Zabriskie.

Talk about dancing with the stars: The glow of the northern lights danced through the night sky this week, thanks to a solar storm that swept past Earth over the past few days. Comet PanSTARRS, which is appearing a little bit farther north in western skies every evening, adds some extra sparkle.

The time around the equinox is considered the peak of the aurora season, because this time of year strikes a balance between the dark skies of winter and the more clement temperatures of summer. And although PanSTARRS may not have panned out the way some of the more optimistic skywatchers might have expected, it's still observable in the Northern Hemisphere — particularly if you're watching with binoculars from a vantage point far from city lights, with a clear view to the western horizon.

This movie from NASA's Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory, or STEREO, shows Comet PanSTARRS as it moved around the sun from March 10 to 15. The clip is repeated three times. The images were captured by the Heliospheric Imager, an instrument that looks to the side of the sun to watch coronal mass ejections as they travel toward Earth, which is the unmoving bright orb on the right. The bright light on the left comes from the sun, and the bursts from the left represent the solar material erupting off the sun.